


Refraction

by thought



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Gen, always remember to drink lots of water, discussion of intra-team violence, lack of communication as a lifestyle choice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-25
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-03-09 03:32:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13472814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought/pseuds/thought
Summary: None of them are good at being people, but Jacobi's a little better than the other two. It's not doing him any favours.





	Refraction

**Author's Note:**

> Written for theimpossumblepossum on tumblr for the prompt “You know, that’s not what an apology sounds like.”

Kepler comes up behind Jacobi where he's sitting slumped on the cheap sofa, slowly letting the still heat of the afternoon weigh him down, the morning's ocean spray and coffee-fuelled anxiety melted away by sunlight through dirty windows coating him in sticky, muffled lethargy. Kepler smells like gasoline, and his hands are ice water cold on the hot skin of Jacobi's arms as he runs them down over his shoulders, resting palms over the crook of his elbows, bent close enough that Jacobi can feel his breath lifting the hair at the back of his neck. The tiny details are just uncharacteristic enough to be jarring, the smell and the cold and his breath catches, it could be anyone behind him, a stranger's hands holding him down-- for a moment Jacobi is outside of his body, pulling back and away and--

Outside a seagull screams and Kepler huffs a little sigh, familiar as Jacobi's own breath, and he's back on the sofa like swimming up through layers of a dream, panic a distant thing rendered meaningless and ephemeral by fatigue and stillness.

"Still mad at you," Jacobi says, listlessly. Across the room Maxwell doesn't look up from her laptop, but the steady click click of her typing falters briefly.

"Mmhm," Kepler hums. "Still not my problem. As long as you don't let them interfere with your work, you're personal feelings are irrelevant. You're not going to let them interfere, are you?"

"you know I'm not," Jacobi says. Outside everything is silent. Even the air feels thick, heavy in his lungs.

There's a thin coating of sand on the cheap linoleum under his feet and he rubs his toes back and forth over it, watches the slight rise and fall of Maxwell's shoulders and tries to match her breathing. She hasn't moved beyond typing for at least an hour, and he can predict the exact way the muscles in her neck will have hardened into knots. He wants to go over and nudge her, break her out of that hyper-focused paralysis, but the steps involved in moving his own body enough to accomplish the task seem insurmountable, and Kepler's hands on his arms feel like restraints.

"Good," Kepler says, and it takes a minute for Jacobi to track the conversation.

Maxwell's hands go still on the keyboard. "You know," she says, far too lightly, "that's not what an apology sounds like. Believe me, I've spent a lot of time figuring them out."

Kepler goes still behind Jacobi. He can't feel it, not enough points of contact, but there's something in the pattern of his breathing, in the way his hands loosen their grip on Jacobi's arms until they're just lying, deliberately lax like the branches of the scraggly little trees out the window, limp and unresponsive in the still air.

"I don't think I asked for your opinion," Kepler says evenly. "This doesn't concern you." And Jacobi lets his head tip to the side, twisting a bit to try to get a look at Kepler's expression, because that's hitting hard right out of the gate.

Maxwell slides her laptop away across the scratched up kitchen table and turns in her chair so she's facing them. Kepler is watching her like you watch a dangerous animal or an unstable chemical compound. Jacobi becomes abruptly aware that he's missing something here, but he's not sure what it is.

"You didn't ask, no," she says, still unsettlingly casual. "I'm just offering some free advice. One failed personthing to another."

"If I want your opinion on human interaction I'll ask for it," Kepler says, his tone making it very clear just how unlikely he sees that circumstance to be.

"You grew up in Chicago," Maxwell says. "It's cold there in the winter. Lots of snow."

"Do you have a point?"

"I bet a lot of your municipal taxes went to fixing the roads. Freeze, thaw. Freeze, thaw. Go back and forth enough times and the pavement starts to buckle."

Kepler huffs a laugh under his breath. "Honestly, Maxwell, do us all a favour and leave the metaphors and double speak to people who have a hope of pulling it off without sounding ridiculous."

Jacobi turns his head back in time to catch the faint flush of embarrassment bleeding across Maxwell's cheeks before it starts to transmute to anger. "Ok," she says. "You're too harsh on Jacobi."

"Hey," Jacobi objects, but Kepler shushes him. He wasn't expecting this to involve him.

"And," Maxwell continues, "You’re too kind to him. He gets away with everything or nothing, and it's not fair of you."

"Not everyone needs such... rigid guidelines," Kepler says. Jacobi forces himself to sit up straight on the couch, head spinning. He tries to remember the last time he drank water and thinks it was maybe the previous night.

"And apparently not all of us need to fulfill all the requirements of our job description. Usually if you're put in charge of people you actually need some basic understanding of management."

"Feel free to stop talking about me like I'm not in the fucking room any time," Jacobi says, waving an exasperated hand at Maxwell. He hasn't got the energy to put any feeling behind the words, but she ducks her head anyway. "And technically he wasn't put in charge of us. He needed to get special permission from Cutter to run his own personal team."

Kepler takes his hands off of Jacobi's arms, finally, and steps back so he's no longer breathing down Jacobi's neck. Jacobi feels better for the distance and he doesn't like that, doesn't know what to do with it. He leans his head back against the top of the couch. His eyes feel sore and swollen for no reason, and he lets them slide shut even as he knows he's leaving his throat bared to the predator that is Kepler.

"And where did you get that piece of intel, Specialist?" Kepler asks, mockingly. "Under cover at the watercooler?"

"Rachel Young, actually," Jacobi says, feeling a little vindictive. "She and I went for drinks. It was a great bonding experience."

What it had actually been was the two of them standing on a private airstrip silently handing a flask back and forth waiting for the jet that Mr. Cutter just so happened to be taking back to Florida right at the same time as they were both also headed that way from their respective business (Jacobi's assassination, Young's something to do with biological weapons). Jacobi had been too tired to be appropriately terrified of her, and he's pretty sure Young was in the midst of a small stress-induced breakdown. Her hair had been slightly messy and he could identify at least one of the guns under her perfectly tailored suitcoat. It had also been the first time he'd realized that she didn't wear heels, she was just that goddamn tall. She had only criticized his assassination skills for maybe fifteen minutes of the plane ride before she'd gotten drawn into an intense game of scrabble with Cutter, so Jacobi definitely counts it as a bonding experience.

"You absolutely did not," Kepler says. "Because if that were true I'd have to kill you, which is really... not. how I wanted to spend my afternoon."

"Oh, and this is?" Jacobi retorts. He's at least 75% sure Kepler is kidding. If the way Maxwell shifts forward in her chair is anything to go by, she's not giving it such generous odds.

"I had some alternate suggestions," Kepler says, and Jacobi can imagine the exact way the corner of his mouth is curling up, mocking. "But you don't seem amenable at the moment. If you're going to insist on holding this ridiculous grudge, Mr. Jacobi, at least put some effort into it instead of flopping around like an over-cooked noodle."

"And you say my metaphors are bad," Maxwell says.

"Somebody google the symptoms of heat stroke," Jacobi grumbles. "I think I'm dying."

"You're not dying," Kepler says dismissively. "Maxwell. Let's take a walk."

Jacobi groans. "Do I need to come mediate?" he asks. "Because full disclosure, I don't know if I can stand up without blacking out right now."

"Drink some vitamin water," Maxwell says. "I'll get you a cold cloth for your face."

"Drink some well-marketed sugar water, you mean?" Jacobi asks, automatically. The fridge door opens and shuts, and a chilly plastic bottle lands on the cushion beside his leg. Kepler is still somewhere behind him, but Jacobi can't track him.

"We'll be back in a while," Kepler says, farther away than Jacobi thought. "Once you're alive see what you can find on the sea creature legends Ms. Wilder told us about this morning."

"Am I looking for anything in particular?"

"Find everything," Kepler says, unhelpfully. Jacobi opens his eyes just in time to hear the screen door rattle shut behind Maxwell and Kepler.

He wonders why they're at each other's throats today. He's still angry at Kepler for jeopardizing their last mission by under-estimating his skills, but Maxwell hadn't even been on that mission with them. 

*

By the time they get back Jacobi's feeling slightly more human, knows more about weird sea monsters than he ever wanted to, and is in the process of securing the windows in the house against the rising winds whipping sand and gravel against the outer walls like a symphony of tiny fists. Faint grumbles of thunder are almost drown out by the wind, and fat raindrops are just starting to make an appearance, leaving streaks on the glass.

There's a bruise darkening on Maxwell's jaw and Kepler walks carefully, favouring his left side with no one around to take advantage of the weakness.

"I thought you said I didn’t need to mediate," Jacobi says. He feels off balance and disconnected, still uncertain what has sparked this conflict and unable to predict their actions as a result. It's not a position he likes to be in, leaves him on edge and acutely aware of any shift in body language or tone.

"We didn't," says Maxwell. There's a smear of black across her forehead. Oil, maybe, or mud. The bruise on her face is probably from falling against something. Or being pushed. It would make sense-- Kepler doesn't hit them. Has never hit Jacobi, and only lashed out at Maxwell like that once. She'd broken his nose in retaliation, but Jacobi thinks Kepler's own brain had punished him ten times more cruelly.

Jacobi doesn't know exactly what it is, if it's the deliberate, performative brutality of the action and its associated social baggage in general that prevents him or something more personal. Hell, maybe he just doesn't like leaving such an obvious mark. It isn't altruism; other forms of violence, physical and psychological, are always on the table, but Kepler draws some invisible line at actually raising his hand to them in that way.

Jacobi's not complaining. He knows compared to Kepler and Maxwell his childhood traumas are mostly garden-variety, but it doesn't make them any less triggering. Neither of his teammates will talk about their childhoods, but from the little he's been able to piece together they went through the sort of shit they make niche documentaries or fictionalized horror novels about twenty years later. He knows Kepler killed his father, and knows Maxwell's considered following his example, and that's some Brontë-style gothic dramatic bullshit right there that he's never going to be ready to poke at.

Kepler's rarely violent with Maxwell-- not because of any lingering sense of chivalry, but rather because it isn't an effective tool. He is always very deliberate in his application of force, uses it to underscore whatever point he's trying to make. Jacobi learned from a young age how not to fight back, how to minimize the damage done and defuse the situation.

Maxwell either never learned that or can't keep herself calm enough to employ it. Maxwell's reaction to physical pain is usually either to ignore it completely or to make whatever or whoever hurt her suffer just as much. She had yelled in Kepler's face the first time he'd slammed her into a wall, kneed him in the ribs with his hands around her throat and then kept coming when he'd fallen back, driving an elbow into his gut and a boot to his knee. He'd been limping for weeks afterward. He had also broken her wrist before Jacobi had unfrozen enough to come between them, the reality of the blank fury in both of their eyes setting his pulse to thundering in his ears even as he'd yelled at them to calm the fuck down and start acting like professionals.

Maxwell and Kepler wound with words, so if one of them made it physical it means they were angry enough to lose control. Jacobi can see the way Kepler's slowly insinuating himself into Maxwell's definition of physical comfort and safety, the triumph in his eyes each time she relaxes under his hands or leans into him briefly like she knows he'll hold her up. Jacobi's watched Kepler learn how to touch with kindness over the past few years. Served as a test subject and drawing board while the older man learned the boundaries and expectations and value. It's probably the only thing he knows for certain Kepler has exposed to him without meaning to.

So yeah. Eventually Maxwell will lose perspective on the norms of physical communication when it comes to Kepler, will read constructive criticism in the bruises and unspoken vulnerability in the aches. But not yet.

"Did you get it out of your systems?" Jacobi asks, not letting any trace of what he's feeling enter his words. Lightning flickers outside, not close enough to mean anything. Maxwell grabs the hoody Jacobi had been wearing that morning off the back of a chair and wraps it around her shoulders, pulling the hood up.

"There was nothing to work out," Kepler says, not even trying to make it sound truthful.

"Oh," Jacobi says, flatly. "Well, in that case."

"Daniel," Maxwell says quiet and apologetic and Jacobi realizes he's gripping the edge of the window sill so hard that the metal has left tiny cuts in the creases of his fingers.

"I'm going to lie down," he says. "I'll teach you everything you never wanted to know about mythical sea creatures later."

"Daniel," she says again. Kepler is busy pouring himself a glass of water from the tap. Jacobi doesn't remind him to use the filter. He'll remember soon enough.

He lies on the hard mattress in the bedroom with the lights out, one window cracked just enough to let the fresh cold air in. He watches the rain spatter in through the screen onto the floor, waits to see if it'll be enough to create a puddle. His head aches, and his eyes are burning like he's about to cry, though there's no reason for it and no tears actually come. One of Maxwell's tee-shirts is crumpled on the pillow beside him, and every time lightning flares up it illuminates the glossy cover of the paperback Kepler's been pretending to read all week where it's lying on the dresser.

He drifts into a half-doze, jerking back to full alertness at each approaching crack of thunder. He can hear the familiar noises of Kepler preparing dinner through the door. After a long while one of them, he can't tell who, goes into the bedroom across the hall and closes the door.

He falls asleep, and because his brain has never heard of subtlety, he dreams about Mr. Cutter standing over him in his high school gymnasium and telling him "There's no I in team."

He wakes up, and there's something outside the open window, trying to get inside.

He wakes up again, for real this time, and Maxwell is behind him, her back pressed up against his. She's shuttering slightly, like she's crying. He's glad at least one of them can.

Mr. Cutter says, "You have to do the trust fall if you want to pass the assignment, Danny."

He wakes up, for real this time. He's alone in the bed. There's nothing outside the window but the rain. Across the hall, he can hear the other two talking quietly.


End file.
